These complexly wrought familiar essays, numbering several of his best, reveal Lambs

characteristic humor, irony, fancy, and delicately archaic style.

As already stated, 'Dream Children: A Reverie' exhibits all Lamb's strengths as an

essayist. It is short but effective in encompassing a range of moods. It starts out on a
convivial and realistic note with the picture of a cosy domestic setting in which the writer
regales his two children with stories of the family past; yet by the end this picture has
dissolved into nothingness, is revealed to be a mere dream, or reverie on part of the
writer. It is, in fact, the picture of the family that Lamb longed for but never actually had,
as he never married, instead devoting a lifetime to caring for his sister Mary
Lamb manages the transition from one mood to another seamlessly, conveying an
ultimate sense of loss without descending to sentimentalilty.
The theme of Lamb's essay is regret and loss: regret for unfulfilled joy, Unfulfilled love,
lost hope, lost opportunity and lost joys of life. There are three topics at work in this
essay. These are the loss of past happiness as represented by the house, with its
carved mantle that a "a foolish rich person pulled it down," and great-grandmother Field
and his brother John. Both great-grandmother Field and John died painful deaths while
Charles lamb watched on, being then left alone without their presence, love and care:
what he missed most was their presence: "I missed him all day long, and knew not till
then how much I had loved him."
The second topic of regret and loss is his beloved Alice. Lamb courted her "for seven
long years" and in the end, his suit for her love was a failure. This explains why the
dream child is named Alice and this explains why he becomes confused about which
Alice, younger or elder, he is really looking at:
This leads to the third thematic topic: the children who never were. In a surprise ending,
in a dramatic (and at first bewildering) twist, we learn that the children he has been
telling stories to--stories of loves and life joys he regrets losing--are air, are a figment of
a dream in a bachelor's sleep. These are the children that would have been, that could
have been, that might have been if Alice had granted Lamb her love and they had wed.
As it is, they are but phantoms of a dream. All he really has is "the faithful Bridget [most
likely his dog] unchanged by my side.
We can see that they had no love life. Charles was devoted to his sister and Braithwaite
was devoted to his work.